Truth, faith, science and religion

I came across an interesting blog article recently, entitled Internet Arguments and the Search For Truth. It discusses the meaning of ‘faith’, and its relation to religion and science. The author has some interesting things to say about ideologues and debate, and I recommend reading it.

Whether science and religion can co-exist seems to be a common topic of disagreement and confusion, especially the divide manufactured between ‘Creationism’ and ‘Evolution’. Certainly it was a common theme to the questions people had to ask last year when the VUW Christian Union ran our Ask God in the Quad event here at Vic, and it has come up again this year.

Unfortunately some Christians have quite strong and loud beliefs along the lines of ‘God created the Earth in 6 (24 hour) days a few thousand years ago, this is the only possible way of interpreting the bible, and Evolution is an evil plot by Science to destroy people’s faith in God’. For their own part, their opponents often have equally fundamentalist views that Evolution conclusively disproves all religion, without even understanding very well what Evolution means.

I see no contradiction between science and Christianity. I am no biologist, and I cannot claim to have a terribly clear knowledge of exactly which of the claims grouped under the popular heading of ‘Evolution’ are generally accepted by the scientific community from what evidence. The closest I have come to studying evolution is the use of evolutionary computation techniques in AI (genetic algorithms, genetic programming, etc.), where they are a useful technique for optimisation and machine learning. My understanding is that there is a clear case from fossil records that there has been change with species throughout history, and a fairly clear case for speciation and common descent (at least to some extent), but there is no scientific consensus on how life came to exist in the first place. There seem to be a range of models for and hypotheses on abiogenesis, but no substantial evidence.

There are in fact quite a range of views within Christianity on the origins of life, based on different interpretations of the creation account given in Genesis. OriginScience.com gives one useful comparison of some of the views, from the perspective of a proponent of Old-Earth Creationism. TalkOrigins has a much shorter summary of some interpretations.

Christians have been thinking about these issues for quite a long time: Augustine of Hippo (a Christian theologian and philosopher who lived from 354 AD to 430 AD) had some interesting attitudes towards the interpretation of the Genesis account (as well as open-mindedness in general). He makes the excellent point:

In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

Davis A. Young has written a good article about Augustine’s views that I recommend reading, both for non-Christians and Christians.

Essay writing as graph traversal

As one of the assignments for COMP425 (Computational Logic) we have to write an essay about ‘logic and computation’. We were discussing this in class yesterday, and it was suggested that essay writing is essentially graph traversal (or perhaps flattening). I wonder how true this is.

History Meme

Following Patrick’s example:

At VUW:

andrew@rise:~$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
105 java
56 cd
51 mixerctl
39 git-branch
26 git-status
25 ls
19 ssh
15 git-checkout
13 xmms2
11 gitk


I am rather surprised that I have run git-branch more than git-status. I guess I tend to run it quite a few times in a row to see branches, create a new one and then check them again.

At home:

andrew@rata:~$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
114 sudo
49 ssh
31 less
30 clothes
28 kontact
27 cd
21 ls
19 ./ical2sqlite
13 ifconfig
13 aptitude


On my laptop:

andrew@rimu:~$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
83 ssh
74 sudo
39 ifconfig
31 xrandr
30 ls
25 sync_rata
25 cd
23 ping
15 iwconfig
15 grep


Blogs

I now post on a couple of other blogs that readers of this one may also want to read:

• The blog for my flat, Kelp. All of us in the flat will be posting on this from time to time.
• I have started a blog for my Honours project, where I will be keeping a regular journal of my research. This is probably of less interest to the general public, unless you find optimising compilers exciting.

ICFP programming contest

Last weekend I competed with a team of VUW students in the ICFP programming contest. This is an annual, international contest lasting 72 hours. It is run by a different university each year, so the format tends to vary from year to year. There are no restrictions on team size, programming languages or computing resources.

Our team (called ‘interfacers’, for want of a better name) consisted in the end (after several people did not end up participating for various reasons, and one person who happened to be in the lab joined us) of Andrew Childs (hereafter referred to as lorne), Timothy Goddard, Clinton Scott, Samuel Hegarty, Michael Welsh (yomcat) and me.

This year, it ran from 10:00 pm on Friday 20th July until 10:00 pm on Monday 23th July. The story behind this year’s task was that an alien (of the Funn species) named Endo had been dumped on Earth by an Interstellar Garbage Collector and then hit by a cargo container. Endo was unconscious, and could not survive on Earth in his then-current form. Therefore our help was urgently needed to provide the necessary modifications to his DNA to adapt him to Earth’s environment. Our proposed modifications were to be evaluated by his spaceship Arrow and the proposal most likely to ensure Endo’s survival would be performed by Arrow.

We were given a copy of Endo’s DNA (a 7.2 MiB string of the letters I, C, F and P), and a specification of how Funn DNA works. The DNA works by repeatedly modifying itself through a long series of matching and replacing according to certain rules (which we were given) until it is all consumed, and in the process producing RNA. We were also provided with a specification of how to transform the RNA into a 600×600 px image. We were given a source image (which is produced by running Endo’s DNA as provided), and a target image (which we were to attempt to reproduce by constructing a prefix to be prepended to Endo’s DNA):

TSCF conference 2007

This week I went to the annual TSCF (Tertiary Students’ Christian Fellowship) conference, this year in Waikanae. It was a great week, with about 100 students from universities around New Zealand attending. Andrew Lim (the pastor of Christ Sanctuary in Palmerston North) spoke in the mornings about I Thessalonians, and Dave Wells (from BCNZ) in the evenings about ‘True Witness’. There were also 5 streams of 3 seminars, though I was a bit disappointed with the stream I chose.

One thing that particularly stood out was the need to live a whole life for God. It is too easy for me to think of worship as something done at church (the Christian habit of calling singing at church ‘worship’ does not help this), rather than an attitude to apply to my whole life. Work (in which I would include study) is God-given. As such, I need to remember to do it as for God, to show an example to others and bring glory to God. Colossians 3:23 says ‘whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord, and not for men’. I have read this before, but I still do not really apply it; I still tend to keep God and the rest of my life separate.

Microsoft remote control car

Last week, one of VUW’s resident Microsofties (a ‘Microsoft student partner’) spoke at Interface’s weekly meeting. At the end of the presentation, he gave away a few freebies. I got a rather cool (apart from the Microsoft branding) mini remote-control car. Ironically, when I got home, put batteries into it and tried it, it did not work — the steering worked fine, but it would not go forwards or backwards.

Fortunately, unlike Microsoft’s software products, it did not have a restrictive license agreement to prevent me from fixing it, so I took it apart and got it working.

Interface key-signing party

Interface are running an OpenPGP key-signing party tomorrow (Wednesday 2-5-2007) night, from 6:30 pm. If you want to participate, read follow the instructions on this page before 4:00 pm tomorrow.

Interface installfest

Interface are having an installfest on Saturday 10th March from 10:00 am in CO341 at VUW. If you would like to try Linux, come along with your computer and we will help you to install it. For more information and to register your interest, see our installfest page.

ACM South Pacific regional programming contest

I competed in the ACM South Pacific regional programming contest in Auckland yesterday, in a team with Cat (Konstantyn Dymnikov) and Clinton Scott. This was the same team as for the NZPC earlier this year. We managed to solve 3 of the 10 problems, placing 36^th. Other teams solved between 0 and 7 problems.